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Periodically, about once a generation, someone awakens the slumbering giant of ancient chronology, the discipline that tells us when the pyramids were built, Troy was destroyed, and Hannibal crossed the Alps.
This person calls into question the collection of ancient dates assembled by scholars of various specialties, mainly over the last century. Often, but not always, the revisionist manages to win a large following by seeking to amend the standard chronology to square with the Bible.
Certainly the most colorful of these establishment-bashers was Immanuel Velikovsky (1895–1979), an expatriate Russian physician and Freudian psychoanalyst. Soon after immigrating to the United States in 1939, Velikovsky had an epiphany: “I came upon the idea that the Exodus took place during a physical catastrophe.” He then began a “reconstruction of ancient history—from the end of the [Egyptian] Middle Kingdom to Alexander of Macedonia.” In the apocalytically titled books Worlds in Collision (1950), Ages in Chaos (1952), Earth in Upheaval (1955), Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960) and Peoples of the Sea (1977), Velikovsky laid out his “reconstruction”: A large chunk of the planet Jupiter broke off (perhaps in a collision with another celestial body) and became a comet that grazed Earth. In the comet’s debris, which turned the Nile red as blood, were the flies that plagued the Egyptians. Heat from the near-collision caused frogs to propagate wildly. The comet’s gravity induced great tides, parting the Nile as Moses lifted his staff. Hydrocarbons in the comet’s tail rained upon the desert in the form of manna. After passing around the sun, the comet grazed Earth again, bringing Earth’s rotation to a halt as Joshua said, “Sun, stand still at Gibeon” (Joshua 10:12). The comet then collided with Mars and eventually became the planet Venus. Thrown out of its own orbit, Mars nearly collided with Earth, precipitating a calamity that destroyed the army of the Assyrian king Sennacherib (704–681 B.C.), who had invaded the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah (see 2 Kings 19:35).
Velikovsky dated the first collision, which caused the miraculous events of the Exodus, to the mid-15th century B.C., whereas the standard chronology dates the Exodus to the mid-13th century. (The Velikovsky version has the added benefit of confirming a passage in 1 Kings 6, which states that Solomon, whom everyone agrees dates to the mid-tenth century B.C., began building his temple 480 years after the Exodus.) He also placed the Exodus at the end of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, which most scholars date to the mid-18th century, and he had the Mycenaean Greeks thriving from the ninth to the seventh century B.C.—about half a millennium later than the standard chronology.
No mainstream scholar has accepted Velikovsky’s chronology, though other revisionists—such as the British author David Rohl—have risen in his wake. The reason the standard chronology is vulnerable to radical questioning, often without a clear response from scholars, is that it’s very complex and few people grasp it in its entirety. All too often the answer to the revisionists—who get books published and appear on TV shows to “defend the Bible”—is “trust me.”
That’s why we asked Leo Depuydt, an Egyptologist with Brown University, to explain the standard chronology and tell us why it’s right. In “How to Date a Pharaoh”, Depuydt does just that, laying out the main elements of this chronology back to the seventh century B.C. The story does not end (or begin) there, however, and more of it will unfold in future issues of Archaeology Odyssey.
Periodically, about once a generation, someone awakens the slumbering giant of ancient chronology, the discipline that tells us when the pyramids were built, Troy was destroyed, and Hannibal crossed the Alps.
